Installing SPEAK

Recently i had to prepare a Sitecore solution for the new ECM (Email Campaign Managment) module. In order to do so i read the instruction on SDN. First task: installing the SPEAK package...

SPEAK stands for Sitecore Process Enablement and Acceleration Kit and it is the new way of defining screenlayouts and enabeling processes within Sitecore.
The installation is done by importing just one package into your sitecore environment.


The SPEAK package is a prerequisite for the new ECM module (2.0 and up) and can be downloaded from the Sitecore SDN pages. This 3.57MB package installs sitecore Items, Config files and several files on filesystem.

During installation the installation wizzard crashed with an error saying

This occurs when items in the package does not meet the requirements in the web.config setting named "invaliditemnamechars".

Inspection of the package shows that a couple items have a - in the itemname.

In my solution we do not want dashes in itemnames because it can be conflicting with this web.config setting:

The workaround is to change the web.config setting InvalidItemNameChars, install SPEAK and revert your web.config. Altough the errorscreen says an error has been written to the logfile, this is not the case. Any more hints on what item is confusing the trouble would be nice!